Spend less time creating board reports

22th August 2023 - Reading time: 3 min

Today, the board of directors deal with a wide range of issues in a business. This place a greater emphasis on using KPIs as a compass for direction as well as having these KPIs as comprehensive as possible. Each board member brings knowledge and experience from their areas of expertise that are imperative to improve operational performance in the company. Insights powered by data therefore become an important supplement as a part of their decision making process so that they can leverage their knowledge for actionable decisions.

One common problem we found is that many companies spend a lot of unnecessary operational time to put together insights from company data on how the business is performing into the board report.

A way of looking at this problem is, “yes it's time consuming, but we are used to this process and it works pretty well”. Let's take a deep dive into a typical process and figure out what makes it time consuming.

Typical time consuming steps

Find the information

Each board report usually contains insights from different areas of your business. It could be sales, marketing, finance, supply chain etc. Usually this data can be found in different systems and excel files, each having different owners or in unfortunate cases, no owner. Someone or a team needs to collaborate and find this information.

Gather and make sense of the information

All this data now needs to be gathered to excel files, data lakes, or other software tools. From there you have to make sense of what type of valuable insights does your board of directors want.

Build the insights and create the report

Then you need to map this data to calculate KPIs that are used by the board. As humans tend to prefer visualizations rather than providing static numbers you have to create graphs and charts in different formats, time periods etc.

All these steps are very time consuming. You could correctly argue that this process is necessary, which it is. However, it makes more sense to automate the process.

What are the benefits of automating your reports

• Significantly reduce the number of hours needed to gather and present the information.
• Reduce stress when this time-sensitive project needs to be done on top of several other operational tasks. The stress will also have a domino effect and decrease overall productivity.
• Reduce the risk of human reporting errors.
• Be confident that the data is updated and presented in real-time.

Here is how we solve it

At STOIX we help companies to automate the process for compiling board reports, as well as other department reports. We connect metric and data stories to match customers' needs.

Our platform provides a wealth of insights, enabling users to choose from a wide range of metrics, build data stories to answer their business questions, and easily share and present these findings across the organization. Our team also offers strategic consultancy for both business and data domains to help you deliver tangible business value.

Want to hear more? Contact us!